In a lopsided affair, Akshaya-Khalid group swept the Panjab University Teachers’ Association (PUTA) elections held on Thursday.

The winning group secured all five posts-president, vicepresident, secretary, joint secretary and treasurer-by defeating their opponents led by Devinder Singh with convincing margins. Of five seats, two have been secured by women.

Akshaya-Khalid group also secured 12 seats of executive member out of the total 14 seats. Of 680 voters in five groups, as many as 633 turned up to vote.

In a triangular contest, Prof Akshaya Kumar was elected the president by beating his closest rival Ram Mehar by 111 votes.

While Kumar pocketed as many as 361 votes, Ram Mehar got 250 votes while the independent candidate Jagdish Rai had to contend with just 11.

In the contest for the post of vice-president, Anil Kumar got the better of Asha Moudgil by securing 349 votes. Moudgil bagged 258 votes. While Amrinder Pal (324) became the secretary by drubbing Parveen Goyal (292), Kitty Sidhu (343) sealed the position of joint secretary by beating Tammana R Sahrawat (261). On the post of treasurer, Navjot (321) got elected by defeating Devinder Preet Singh (286).

From the winning group, PU chief security officer Jatinder Grover won by the highest margin of 130 votes from group 5 of executive members.

Newly elected president spells out priorities

Elated after being elected as the president, Kumar thanked the teaching community for supporting the team.

The newly elected president vowed to fulfil all promises made by the group. While spelling out the priorities, Kumar said they would press for promotion of teachers under career advancement scheme (CAS), academic performance indicator (API) with capping and its date of implementation, additional increments for MTech, additional increments for those who joined with PhD, direct recruitment against vacant positions, senior professorship for teachers and improvement of audit.

Congratulating the rivals for the victory, Ram Mehar wished them good luck for their oneyear term. “I hope they live up to the expectation of the teaching community,” he said. Spelling out the reasons for the defeat, Ram Mehar said his opponent has been in teacher politics for many years whereas it was his first election.